Somerville, MA | Natural Wine Bar & Shop | Wine Club Subscription

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Key Results

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• Steady, low-maintenance operation on Table22, nearly 4 years running 
• Three approachable tiers, starting at $45 a month, sold across three Somerville and Cambridge spaces
• A monthly pickup party that's grown into a standing, multigenerational community night

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Nothing but wine for twenty years

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Lauren Friel opened Rebel Rebel in 2018 in Somerville's Bow Market, a tiny natural wine bar built on offbeat producers, chalkboard pours, and a mission to make wine feel like it belongs to everyone. The bar earned national recognition almost immediately, including multiple James Beard Foundation nominations for its wine program, and became known as one of the places that pushed natural wine into the mainstream of American wine culture well before most of the country had caught up.

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Two years later, Friel opened Wild Child a few doors down, a wine shop and bookstore that now serves as the home base for her wine club. She'd go on to co-found Dear Annie in Cambridge as well, but the throughline across all three spaces is the same: an all-natural focus, close relationships with small and often women-led producers, and a belief that good wine doesn't require a trust fund or a sommelier certification to enjoy.

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"It's all we do is wine," Friel says. "And all I've done is wine for twenty years." That depth shows up in how she talks about her work: not gatekeeping, but translating. Whether someone walks in knowing everything or nothing, she wants them to leave with a bottle they'll actually love.

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A life preserver with a lot of loose ends

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The wine club started as a pandemic pivot. With the bar closed and revenue gone, Friel needed a way to keep the business alive and keep bringing wine to the people who'd come to rely on her for it - and the club worked. It kept Rebel Rebel afloat through the hardest stretch of the pandemic and, in the process, connected Friel with a group of members who are still with her today.

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But running it herself came at a cost. For about a year and a half, Friel and a member of her team handled the club entirely in-house, sorting through orders and running credit cards by hand on top of everything else already demanding their attention behind the bar. "It was hilarious. It was so hard," Friel says. There was no system for something as simple as a member wanting to pause a shipment. Every request meant someone remembering to track it down and handle it manually, on top of a plate that was already full.

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Handing off the admin, keeping the wine

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Friel brought Table22 in to run the infrastructure so she could stay focused on the part of the job that she actually likes: picking the bottles. Nearly four years later, the club now runs across all three of her businesses, with members signing up through QR codes at Rebel Rebel, Wild Child, and Dear Annie. 

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The difference in her day-to-day is stark. When a member reaches out to pause or cancel, whatever the reason, Friel doesn't have to remember to update a spreadsheet or track down a credit card number. "I'm like, great, email Table22, they'll take care of it for you," she says. A member recently messaged to say she was pregnant and needed to pause her subscription. Friel said yes on the spot and didn't think about it again. "It's a huge load off, honestly."

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The first Friday of every month

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What Friel didn't expect was what the club would become once the logistics stopped eating up her time. Every first Friday, members gather at Wild Child for a pickup party: two hours of come-and-go tasting, snacks, and conversation about that month's selections. It's grown into something closer to a standing community night than a retail event. Families with young kids show up alongside twenty-somethings and longtime regulars in their sixties. Over time, some of them have become genuine friends through nothing more than showing up on the same Friday each month.

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The club has also reached people who now have families or schedules that don't leave much room for a night out, but still want a real connection to good wine. For them, the monthly box and the pickup party have become one of the few dependable ways to stay in Friel's orbit.

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There's a generational split in how members talk about what they're tasting, something Friel finds genuinely delightful. Older members tend to reach for classic tasting-note language, while younger members are more likely to describe a wine by the song or film it reminds them of. Both are welcome. 

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And the enthusiasm cuts both ways. Friel tastes wine constantly as part of the job, enough that it would be easy to go on autopilot. Members pulling her aside to talk about a bottle that genuinely surprised them, wine they say they've never had anything like before, has become one of the more unexpected rewards of running the club. It gives her back the energy of a beginner's mindset which she doesn't always get to occupy anymore.

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More bottles, more neighbors

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Natural wine has moved from niche to mainstream since Friel first opened Rebel Rebel, and she's watched her club grow alongside that shift, with more people actively seeking out the kind of wines she's built her career around. With Table22 handling billing, fulfillment, and every pause or cancellation request that comes in, Friel's focus stays where she wants it: selecting the wines, writing about them, and hosting the room full of neighbors who show up to drink them together.

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"Good wine doesn't have to be expensive," she says, "and it doesn't have to be complicated either." Four years in, that's still the whole idea behind the club, just with a lot fewer spreadsheets involved.
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